Video premiere: Vistalite, ‘Don’t Listen to Yourself’

Kevin Bronson on March 20th, 2017

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After the demise, in January 2013, of the beloved L.A. indie-rock quartet the Deadly Syndrome, drummer Jesse Hoy embarked on a solo project — the result, he says, of realizing “that I had a lot more music inside me that I needed to get out.” It’s called Vistalite. Or as Hoy says, “kind of a doozy.” An arresting concoction of raw, danceable garage-rock and electro-charged punk, Vistalite is envisioned as a long-term project — Hoy plans 26 EPs, each corresponding to a letter in the alphabet. “I’m doing this so that when you look at all the EPs in iTunes or any other music service that orders by album name, you’ll be listening to it in the order it was written,” he explains, “so the whole project will become an autobiography of sorts. I can imagine that when I get into my 50s and I’m on the latter half of the project, the music will sound a lot different than the stuff I started out with, or am doing now.”

The forthcoming fourth EP is titled “Dark White,” the follow-up to “Astrobiology,” “Bobok” and “Carry On, Carrion.” The video for the new song “Don’t Listen to Yourself” stars Hoy’s daughter Tennyson, who is strapped to Dad’s chest as he boogies down a sidewalk. In that way, the Vistalite EP series could become a family album as well as a autobiography — Hoy’s first video back in 2013, after all, featured his first daughter Woodley, who was the same age, to the day, as Tennyson was when the new video was shot. If your smile’s broken, these might help.

||| Watch: The videos for “Don’t Listen to Yourself” and “A Moment” (2013)